Nostalgia

Update – 7/06/2015

So in the nine years since the first installment of this post, the vintage comic strips reprints has absolutely exploded. I would never have imagined in 2006 that what I was calling “The Golden Age of Comic Strip” would REALLY be a gold age. Seriously, I don’t know how this will ever be surpassed, except that someday everything will be available digitally. But for the quality of the reprints that are being made now and the sheer quantity of titles, I don’t see how it could get better. Pretty much all of my personal grails have been addressed, and a lot of secondary ones are on the way. I mean, we’re on volume 25 of Peanuts! Volume 19 of Dick Tracy! Volume 14 of Mary Perkins, which wraps up over 20 years of continuity, just as that strip’s creator, the very talented Leonard Starr, died last week. It’s good that he was able to see such love for his work at that stage of his life. I’m happy I got to meet him briefly during a San Diego Comic Con a few years ago (as he was chatting with Ray Bradbury!) It would be even better if someone would reprint his run that revived Annie in the wake of the hit stage show. In any case, it’s not unusual now for comic strips to be back in the headlines. There is a Peanuts movie hitting the theaters soon (the first since Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown in 1980), the New Yorker is running articles about Gasoline Alley, you can go on a cruise with the top cartoonists of today, and there is a recent documentary that has hit Netflix and VOD about the gradual fall of the comic strip and newspapers in general, and what that means for the future of the medium.

Having begun as a successful Kickstarter campaign, this documentary, Stripped, is pretty good and for those who haven’t been following the industry very informative. Director Dave Kellett interviews over 70 people connected to the comic strip biz including most of the stars from the past 30 years. But there’s one “get” that is truly astounding, seeing as this person doesn’t general give interviews, talk to the public, or have his picture taken: Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes. I don’t think anyone who was alive during 1985-1995 needs to be told the hold that Calvin and Hobbes has on that generation. Or that Bill Watterson is considered a genius for the way he translated universal feelings about growing up into the adventures of a boy and his (stuffed?) tiger. But since his voluntary retirement in 1995, Watterson has been as reclusive as Thomas Pynchon or J.D. Salinger, not making any appearances, not giving any interviews, just generally staying away from any kind of limelight. He preferred to let his work speak for him, which it did indeed, being continually in print throughout the years. And a massive hardcover box set reprinting every single strip was produced in 2005 with a paperback version following in 2012. And that was it. For nearly 20 years only the strip remained to remind us of his genius.

Until now. Now, suddenly, Bill Watterson seems to be (relatively) everywhere. He is interviewed in that Stripped documentary, albeit in voice only. In fact, he apparently liked the documentary so much he drew the poster, his first published cartoon work in 19 years! He also drew the poster for the 2015 Angoulême International Comics Festival, although he wouldn’t be attending, even though it’s tradition having won the Grand Prix the previous year. And even stranger, but more exciting, he once again graced the newspaper comic pages! In an unannounced guest spot on Stephen Pastis’ Pearls Before Swine strip, Watterson drew the meat of a narrative sequence that lasted for a week last Summer. All of this activity is wildly out of the ordinary for the seldom seen artist but his most important recent appearance is that of a very long, very detailed interview with Jenny Robb of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum that has been published as a catalogue accompanying an exhibit of his work: Exploring Calvin And Hobbes: An Exhibition Catalogue. If you are a fan of Calvin and Hobbes at all, I highly recommend chasing down all of those links and especially the interview book itself.

My homemade Calvin and Hobbes

Even if Mr. Watterson keeps up this welcome recent visibility, one thing you probably will still never see is any merchandise surrounding Calvin and Hobbes. Now, being that this site is mainly about the love of licensed merchandise, you might think that I would be disappointed by this, and possibly pursue that very American pastime of wanting more: more interviews, more cartoons, more Bill Watterson. But surprisingly, I don’t. That hasn’t always been the case. In fact, in the late 1980s I even tried sculpting Calvin and Hobbes myself, for my sister (who still owns these). I wanted merchandise, I wanted plush, I wanted t-shirts, I wanted toys. But Bill Watterson didn’t. Boy, he really didn’t. I’m going to digress here for a moment to reflect on Charles Schulz, a man who did not mind merchandise, or movies, or toys whatsoever. One big reason why he didn’t mind was that he trusted the company who was responsible for the majority of Peanuts products for over 40 years, a company called Determined Productions. While they are sadly no longer around, while Schulz was alive the took extremely good care of his creations. If you bought any Snoopy or Charlie Brown merchandise from the 1960s to the 1990s, odds are it was stamped Determined Prod. somewhere on it. They made books, they made plush, they made the Russell Stover figurines, for cryin’ out loud! And Charles Schulz trusted them quite a bit. I know this because it just so happens I worked for Determined for number of years, mainly designing toys for Wendy’s, but seeing a lot of the overall relationship with the Peanuts brand.

I bring this up because of a story that was told to me not long after I started working there. I was very curious about the history of the company and all the licenses they had worked with, and at one point Calvin and Hobbes came up. Now, this story may be apocryphal but this is how it was told to me, and knowing what we know about Bill Watterson I have no reason to doubt it. Supposedly when Calvin and Hobbes hit big in the late 1980s, Determined wanted to see if there was possibility of manufacturing some items based on the strip (at the time they were making merchandise from a lot of the popular characters of the day such as Felix the cat, Garfield, and Where the Wild Things Are). But they had no way of contacting Watterson directly, as he wasn’t returning correspondence sent to his syndicate. So they asked Charles Schulz to give an introduction, which he did, writing a letter extolling the care and craftsmanship that Determined gave to all of his characters. They created detailed prototypes of Calvin, Hobbes as a tiger, Hobbes as a stuffed toy, and Spaceman Spiff (which I was told were magnificent) and sent them off with Schulz recommendation. And then they heard nothing. Nothing at all for weeks. Until one day they received a package…that contained no correspondence of any kind, just the cut up remains of the plush prototypes. Thus ended their pursuit of that license.

I’ve thought about this story off and on over the years. The severe reaction to Determined’s overture intrigues me, and the older I get the more I realize that very few things in the world reman untainted or uncompromised. But this beloved comic strip has. And when you read the few times that Watterson has explained himself you see that it wasn’t an easy fight, that he had to battle over and over until he won the full rights to his creation that he was able to protect it fully. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy he’s peeked out for a bit and I’d welcome the occasional artwork, but I think now after 20 years since the end of Calvin and Hobbes I’ve come around to agreeing with his viewpoint. Calvin and Hobbes is a perfect creation; to try and extend it or make anything that takes it out of the realm of comic strip would change it. And not, I think, for the better. So let’s just leave it alone. No more websites about Calvin and Hobbes, no more “peeing bumper stickers”, no more documentaries about what the strip means to everyone. Let Peanuts have the big movies. I’ll be content occasionally taking one of those books off the shelf and letting my imagination take me to places that no movie ever could. Just like Bill Watterson wants it.

Update – 7/27/2010

Here’s the thing: San Diego Comic Con is no longer about comics. Yes, I know this is not news. Many, many, many people have pointed out what a shame it is that movie, tv, and toys have taken over the con in the past decade. I am not necessarily one of those people: I enjoy the con more for the broader scope and the inclusion of hollywood. I especially like that SDCC has replaced Toy Fair as the place to celebrate collectors and unveil new toys for the year (although I really wish companies could figure out how to keep a lid on news better so there were more genuine surprises).

Fantagraphics has spent over two years negotiating with Disney over these reprints. And while Carl Barks’ and his Ducks comics are well-known and revered, a much smaller group of people is aware of the seminal work done by Gottfredson on Mickey Mouse. These strips are pretty much the last of the “greats” to be reprinted, in what is now the Golden Age for classic comic strip reprints. What is big about this news is that these strips have NEVER been reprinted uncut before, and many of them not at all. Think about that: for 70 years, Disney has let some of the best work featuring their flagship character go unseen. Can you imagine if Marvel had never reprinted the Ditko Spider-Man issues, except in compilations? Sure, many individual stories have been chopped up into comics over the years, but these stories were heavily edited, rewritten, and relettered.

While it remains to be seen if Disney can bring themselves to go through with a hands-off policy, Fantagraphics has the best shot ever to not only show these strips as they were originally seen (and from all accounts, Disney keeps excellent copies of everything in their morgue, so they’ll look better than anyone has seen them) but do so in a great presentation, judging by their treatment of Peanuts and Popeye among others. I’m just hoping that Disney sees that these are of historical value and let’s Fantagraphics reprint EVERYTHING, warts and all.

Now where are those Gottfredson Mouse & Friends toys?!?

Original Post – 12/30/2006

If there is one thing I enjoy collecting more than toys, it has to be books. I like books in all shapes and sizes, but mostly concentrate on biographies, books on history, art, and films. But one genre is the most near and dear to my heart: compilations of classic comic strips.

But the one strip that really grabbed me (outside of Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey and Carl Bark’s Duck stories) was the absurdist fantasy world of E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre, aka Popeye (At one point, I thought I would even make the ‘definitive’ Popeye website!). Now, growing up with classic cartoons on tv every afternoon in the 70s had given me an already healthy appreciation of the spinach-eating sailor. But that Popeye was nowhere near as rich a character as the one to be found in the original run of comic strips. Sadly, what passed for Popeye in the comic pages of the day was a pale imitation of ‘gag-a-day’ strips done by Segar’s old assistant, Bud Sagendorf. And Popeye was by no means alone in this regard: Mickey, Moon Mullins, Barney Google (now Snuffy Smith) and others had all been reduced to simple comedy, eschewing more complicated continuities and abdication almost all storytelling to comic books and TV. Even those strips like Dick Tracy and Mary Worth that still continued to run longer storylines couldn’t hold a candle to their glory days. And don’t even get me started on the newspaper version of Spider-Man, where sometimes it took weeks for Peter Parker to walk out of his apartment door!

But it turned out that I was in luck! I was growing up at just the right time, as numerous publishers had seen fit to reprint selected titles from the Golden age of newspaper strips, most likely in response to Bill Blackbeard’s Smithsonian volume. Shel Dorf was reprinting numerous title with his Blackthorne label, Bill Blackbeard was covering Wash Tubbs & Easy (and an ill-fated attempt at reprinting the Gottfredson’s Mickeys), Another Rainbow was publishing a massive B&W Carl Bark’s Library, and Kitchen Sink was undertaking the first comprehensive reprinting of Li’l Abner, from 1934 to 1977! Even better, Fantagraphics begin publishing a magazine devoted to comics strips, Nemo, a selection of Little Orphan Annie books, and the jewel in the crown: The Complete E.C. Segar Popeye.I gobbled up all of these books and devoured them time and again. The intricacy of the art and the cinematic nature of the storytelling all left me lamenting the state of the modern comics page. But at least I had the reprints…for a time. By the early 90s a shift had taken place. Video games and “grim ‘n gritty’ comics were crowding out simpler fare, and by the middle of the decade even the last of the reprints had died out. Collections of classic strips would be all but forgotten. But there were a few signs of life: DC Comics had been publishing archives of Will Eisner’s Spirit since the late 90s, and in recent years both Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side debuted single volume collections that contained EVERY strips from each’s respective runs. But classic strips still had not gotten their due. Until 2004, that is. That’s when our old friends at Fantagraphics were able to fulfill a lifelong dream of theirs: comprehensively reprinting Charles Shultz’s Peanuts in chronological order (which amazingly had never been done). The sales of these initial volumes far exceeded expectations, leading to a new boom in reprints- not only are the old strips being rediscovered, but this time around (unlike in the 80s) they are being given the upscale designer treatment with heavy stock, handsome covers, and in some cases full color Sundays at the original publication sizes.

In the past year we’ve seen new editions of Buz Sawyer, Peanuts, Gasoline Alley, Dennis the Menace, Dick Tracy, Mary Perkins, Li’l Abner, Steve Canyon, and yes, Popeye, finally printed in a huge edition complete with color Sunday pages. And even more are coming in the future? Who knows. Even though I really would like to see someone tackle Annie and Moon Mullins, my biggest wish would be for Disney to recognize the market out there for a quality B&W reprinting of the Mickey Mouse strips in chronological order. They’ve never been reprinting unedited since publication. But with sequences like this they probably will never have the guts to release it. Which is why I blew a few hundred bucks last year on decent quality xeroxes of the fabled Comic Buch Club Germany portfolio. Still, I’d much rather have a nice clean official version. If these compilations continue to do well in the marketplace, I may yet get my wish someday. And they we might even see toys based on the classic Gottfredson Mouse and Barks Ducks! Oh, and if you really want a good look at the sorry state of today’s comic strips, why not give The Comics Curmudgeon a read?

So I was browsing through Netflix the other night, looking at their range of mediocre to abysmal choices of things I haven’t seen when I stumbled across the newish documentary “The People vs George Lucas”. With no better choices at hand I proceeded to watch it as I wrapped up some late night editing for a project I’m behind on at my “real job”. Let me rephrase that: I tried to watch it. I got about halfway through it before I had to turn it off and put on a Beatles album (FYI: A Hard Day’s Night) to wash away the taste it left in my brain. At its most basic, this was nothing more than what any Star Wars fan has seen thousands of times in every nerd/geek/fanboy forum online since the special editions were released in 1997 up through Revenge of the Sith in 2005. And honestly, I’m kind of tired of going over the same ground over and over and over (Han shot first, Jar Jar sucks, George doesn’t care about us, fans have equal ownership, ad infinitum).

To make it perfectly clear, I didn’t really care for the film. Decently made, but I didn’t see the point to it (even if you tell me at the end they defend George’s right to do whatever he wants with his films…who cares? That point was debated a decade ago). But it did really open my eyes to something I’ve never really thought about before: George absolutely did the right thing when he made the prequels. What did he do right, you ask? Well, going all the way back to Star Wars in 1977, George has continually said that these are kid’s movies. Made for kids. Now, most fans see that as a cop-out. An excuse, a shoddy justification for everything they don’t like about the prequels. And I’m not the first person to point out that he is right, these are kid’s movies. We fell in love with them as children. If you really go back and look at Star Wars today with a clear, cynical grown-up’s eye, you can see how juvenile the first movie was. How black and white. How simplistic.Â And there is nothing wrong with that.

Somewhere down the line, “kid’s movie” became synonymous with “dumbed down crap”, but it wasn’t always that way. E.T. is a “kid’s movie”. Every Disney classic is a “kid’s movie”. You can say that The Wizard of Oz is a kid’s movie. But what we’re really saying is that these are family films- enjoyable for all ages. Now, the prequels are regrettably lacking in finesse. They definitely could have used a rewrite or two and a little better character motivations. But look around: kid’s today still love these movies. They like Jar Jar. They think the Battle Droids are funny. Go read Drew McWeeny’s great series on introducing his sons to the Saga: http://in-my-head.org/2011/11/07/recommended-reading-drew-mcweenys-film-nerd-2-0-star-wars-edition/

George made the right call here. He kept aiming that target in the same place he aimed it in 1977 and 1980 and 1983. And the kids that are enjoying the prequels today (and the Clone Wars, and the video games, and the toys) are going to grow up thinking just as fondly about all of this as we did 20-30 years ago.

I know what you’re thinking. I know, I know. You wanted to see something else. You want Jar Jar gone. You didn’t want silly Battle Droids and endless Jedi fighting. Or C-3PO’s antics. I get it, I really do. But let me point you in the direction of a comparable genre that didn’t take the path that Lucas did. No, this property at some point decided that instead of staying aimed at kids, it would grow up with them. It would evolve and start experimenting with just how far it could push the characters and the existing boundaries. It would get dark, it would get edgy. You know where I’m going with this: it’s comics.

At the same moment that Star Wars was capturing a generation of kids, comics was telling those kids that it was OK to never grown up and leave them behind like the previous generations did. No, once the 1980s hit continuity became king. If you weren’t on board from the beginning it became harder and harder to get on the ride. And every year less and less kids were reading comics. And comics responded by catering to that 80s generation’s every whim in a self-destructing feedback loop. So here we are. Comics exist almost solely as fodder for merchandise and movies and once the 40 and 50 year olds stop buying them the industry is pretty much going to die off (How’s that New 52 treating ya, fans?). Or move onto the web. And collectors alone can’t sustain all the toys or even movies when they are anything but a crowd pleasing, family friendly hit (looking at you, Green Lantern!) But Star Wars? Well, kids will be watching that just like they do the Disney films. Every seven years a new generation will pick it up, and the juggernaut starts up all over again.

As I was driving to work last week on my hour long commute I was listening to the Sirius XM channel “Backspin”, which for those who don’t know is a Hip Hop station. Well, really a “Rap” station. Actually, to be specific, an oldies Rap station. And I pondered that: has Rap really been around so long that it has an oldies station?!?

Well, yes. Back when I was in my formative years (the 1980s) I would often listen to the local oldies station (on AM radio!) while my friends were listening to Heavy Metal or New Wave, or yes, Rap. And it felt like that music was from a much distant time, one that had no reflection on what was happening around me. But I was seeing it strictly from the eyes of youth, where all time flow seems long and past events seem ancient. The truth is that the music being played, rock from the 1950s and 1960s, was really only about 10-15 years old at it’s tail end. And because it hadn’t happened within my lifetime it only seemed very old.

The same is true for Rap. To today’s kids, it probably very much sounds like oldies music. In fact, classic Rap is now edging on 40 years old, and most of the material on “Backspin” was popular between 20-30 years ago (full disclosure: I didn’t really become immersed in Hip Hop until my 30s). So if Rap/Hip Hop is hitting the big “4-o”, and we have a sitting president who is only 50 years old, is Barack Obama the first “Hip Hop President”? Now, obviously, this issue does involve his race a bit. Being the first black President makes him more likely to be the first Hip Hop President for two reasons: back then (and still true today) Hip Hop was mainly performed by black artists and its popularity was larger in black audiences. So being black, he would more likely be on the Hip Hop train before a white person of similar age.

The real criteria though is his age itself. The past two Presidents were squarely in the Baby Boomer camp, and aficionados of that era’s Rock and Country music, (both hailing from the South). Before that, we had numerous Presidents of the “Greatest Generation” of WWII participants. So popular music ranging from Benny Goodman to Lynyrd Skynyrd has been amply represented. While I think Obama is skirting the back end of the Boomers, he was hitting just the right age during the birth of Rap, and was in college for Rap’s formative Golden Years.

We know that Obama does listen to Hip Hop (and was criticized for leaving it out of his campaign music), and has cemented a number of friendships with noted artists and pioneers of the form. But I don’t think he is quite the true first Hip Hop President that will be as big a game changer as his being the first black President. Yes, he has let some coded signals to the knowing fan slip into his appearances. Yes, he is already disillusioning those in the community that thought he was the one. Yes, he does hang with Hova and Beyoncé. But Obama might just be a bit too cool. He’s not going to be breaking out in a duet with Busta anytime soon. I could see him as the first Jazz President, maybe, but Clinton easily has that one tied up.

No, Obama is too cerebral, and frankly too old. The real first Hip Hop President will have grown up immersed in the culture, not grown up alongside it. He (or She) will have never known a unified “top 40” music chart, but instead a fractured melange of Grunge, Hip Hop, Acid, Boy Band, Pop. And probably, he will be white. Not white like Rick Santorum, or Mitt Romney. But part of that generation that went to see LL Cool J or Naughty by Nature without ever thinking of them as black performers, but just as one more musical act.

The beauty of time is that eventually all trends are inevitable. And whereas going from Big Band to Pop to Rock seemed jarring at the time, it was a relatively gentle progression (albeit one that led to Civil Rights and Hippie culture, aka all the things that divided the Boomers). Hip Hop, on the other hand, was a cultural shift. And by the time it became mainstream the youth that enjoyed it ranged across the entire spectrum of black, white, rich, poor, gay, straight. This demographic is going to more acceptant of who you are, who you love, and what color your skin is. Mainly by not caring who you are, who you love, or what color your skin is. And so, in my eyes, the promise of the first Hip Hop President isn’t as much about music as it is the inevitability of acceptance. And come to think of it, she’s probably going to be Hispanic anyway.

“You take out ‘of Mars,’ you don’t tell where he came from? That’s what makes it unique!” a former Disney executive said. “They choose to ignore that, and the whole campaign ends up meaning nothing. It’s boiled down to something no one wants to see.– ‘John Carter’: Disney’s Quarter-Billion-Dollar Movie Fiasco”

So in a couple of weeks we’re going to see the long awaited (and I mean long awaited!) debut of both the first big-screen adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs “John Carter of Mars” books, and the first live-action film from noted Pixar director Andrew Stanton. Sadly, most of the people who might be the target audience for this film probably have zero awareness of either of those two facts. And that is unfortunately only a very small part of the utter failure of Disney to market this movie.

But before I talk about the marketing muddle, first I need to address a few issues with the movie itself that did the marketing team no favors in my eyes. Let me preface all of this by saying that I haven’t seen any of the film past the trailers and featurettes released, and that I’m assuming that it is a good solid film based on Stanton’s track record. Word trickling out so far has been good to great, from the journalists who have seen it so far. I’m not really a fan of the character, having never read any of the books. However, it has permeated pop culture enough that I am fairly aware of the popular image of John Carter & co. And although Taylor Kitsch may be a great actor, he just doesn’t seem right for the part of a Civil War veteran described as being a 6’2″, steel-eyed, clean shaven, man in his 30s. Kitsch is just too “current”, he seems every bit a boyish young man of the 21st century. This part needs a Sean Connery, a Harrison Ford, a Gregory Peck. A “man”. And a man who not only has a steely resolve, but a sense of humor. A swashbuckler. That is not Kitsch.

His female counterpart, Dejah Thoris, needs to be the opposite. Tough, but sensuous. Voluptuous. Striking. I’ve heard good things about Lynn Collins’ performance, but like Kitsch she seems eminently forgettable. Good casting for Dejah would have been Angelina Jolie, circa 2003. Not because Jolie is necessarily perfect for the role, but that combination of allure and otherworldlyness that she exuded is what the role needs. Both parts should be an alpha male and an alpha female. But we didn’t get that, regrettably. How Disney bankrolled such a huge budget with no stars is puzzling, but maybe they expected the same luck they had with Pirates of the Caribbean to strike again.

The other thing that really bugs me are the design choices for nearly everything. Stanton seems to have fallen into that very modern trap of needed to make everything in the film “real” and grounded in some sort of explainable reality. So the Tharks (four-armed green men) are equated to the thin, sinewy Masai warriors, both being desert-dwelling societies. And the Martian landscape itself is a slightly modified version of Utah’s Monument Valley, with no red vistas to be found. Since Burroughs described Dejah’s people as “red-skinned”, and they found that actually coloring the skin looked problematic, Stanton chose to cover them in red tattoos to explain away the reference (which is odd that he picked that to be so literal about but ignore the descriptions of Tharks or John Carter himself).

The creature design falls prey to nearly all creature design cliches that we’ve seen since the advent of CGI; either animals that are made to look as if they could actually exist, or ones so fantastic that they couldn’t be made without CGI (see nearly everything ever designed by Neville Page). Hey, even the Star Wars prequels fell into this trap. As a kid I was fascinated by the Tauntauns and dewbacks, and Wampas and Rancors of the original trilogy. I don’t think there is a single creature in the prequels that inspires any love (much less countless toys). I look at the banner shown below and at first glance it looks like a guy riding an elephant, with a giant frog next to him. You can barely tell the middle figure is an alien, and almost assuredly can’t tell it has four arms. And the “hot chick” is so far back she may as well be just another guy. With the uninspired costumes, creatures, and landscapes, this may as well be Prince of Persia 2 instead of a timeless space fantasy.

Sidenote: Paramount Studios tried to get their version of John Carter off the ground for about a decade being letting the rights lapse, first with director Kerry Conran (the failure of his “Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow” probably killed his chances) and later Robert Rodriguez and John Favreau, who went straight to Iron Man after it all fell through. Conran’s version, at least, would have shared similar designs as Stanton’s does, but really amped up the fantasy element instead of grounding it in “realism”. Check out the presentation reel he made:

And that right there nails what this movie is not being promoted as, but should be: space fantasy. It is NOT science fiction…but the marketing team seems to think it is. The books that the film is based on were written 100 years ago, literally! Countless movies have stolen generously from them, and audiences have seen these concepts many times before. So even though the stories may be somewhat well known to a small readership, the general public has no idea who these characters are, what they should look like, and the context of what was “fantastic” in 1912. Why on Earth would anyone try and make this thing “realistic”?!? Why wouldn’t you reimagine those parts that were stolen and give us a version we aren’t expecting? Tarzan has never been faithful to those (outdated) stories, so why does this need to be? Before I go into the terrible promotion of John Carter, just move your mouse over the image below. That’s the difference of how the publisher sold the books (with seminal art by Frank Frazetta) vs how Disney is selling the movie.

The biggest marketing sin is right up front: nothing about the marketing materials (posters, trailers, title) tells you ANYTHING about this movie, other than it’s some kind of science fiction film. It doesn’t tell you it’s from the visionary directory of Finding Nemo and Wall-E, it doesn’t tell you it’s based on the groundbreaking, influential books by the creator of Tarzan. It doesn’t scream Romance! Action! Adventure! No, instead they dropped all mention of Mars from the title in favor of the lead character’s boring name. I can’t imagine being excited as an eight year old wanted to see a movie called “Luke Skywalker”. But the name thinghas beenhashed over enough. I’ll just say that when everybody’s first reaction to hearing the new title is some form of rebellion, it should be evident that you’ve made a mistake. As I pointed out above, the posters leave much to be desired: no custom logo for the movie, just an average looking typeface (but one that would be dead on for a cerebral sci-fi film). Horribly desaturated color palette. The lead character is tiny (this is almost worse on another big piece where Carter is upstaged by two uninspired ape/mole creatures on the set of Attack of the Clones) and bored looking. It’s sad when the two best pieces of promotion are a poster made by a niche company for a midnight giveaway and a fan made trailer that is 50 times better than any “official” one put together by Disney.

It’s funny that every film like this aspires to be Star Wars (especially in the eyes of the studio execs and accountants) but no one looks to the lessons of Star Wars when they are making these films. Star Wars (and I’m talking Episode 4: A New Hope, here, not the prequels) was a fantasy film through and through. There was no explaining how so many aliens could exist, or how they knew English, or how the space ships worked…they all just did. And the designs were iconic, with attention paid more for impact and “cool factor” than how “real” they might seem. The casting was either mainly unknowns who totally embodied the roles, or gifted veterans to lend gravitas. And every set piece was fantastic in the truest sense of the word. Nothing about Star Wars felt pedestrian. It felt earnest, and exciting, but every where you looked was something you had never seen before. Hey, Disney: I’ve seen Utah.

No, the lesson filmmakers take away is that George made everything worn and rusty as if it existed in a “found universe”. Which was a brilliant conceit on his part to ground the fantasy. It was not the ends in itself. George also understood how to sell his movie to the public, as a space serial. As wonder. As “fun”. Look at the original Star Wars posters, and you can see where George understood the power in those Frazetta illustrations. And why is this movie rated PG-13? It has DISNEY on the title! From on of the founders of Pixar! People tend to overlook something else that made Star Wars a massive hit. It was a movie for kids. Kids who turned out in droves, and brought the family along. Kids who grew up spending money on Star Wars and buying, buying, buying Star Wars toys. And boy, George knew how to sell toys. Lots and lots of toys. And I keep seeing reference to Disney making John Carter in the first place to be a licensing powerhouse tentpole for the studio. Except…where are the toys?

In fact, where is any John Carter merchandise? See, the movie opens in a few weeks and the industry rule of thumb is that most movie-based toy lines will have made 60% of their sales before the movie opens. Heck, Avengers doesn’t open until the Summer and those toys are currently on shelves everywhere. But nothing for John Carter. At all. This, I just can’t understand. Sure, sure, I get that Disney may be gun shy after the debacle of Prince of Persia, a movie that sold few tickets and almost no toys. And that was followed by an even bigger failure in their eyes, Tron:Legacy. It bombed with most audiences, and the toys were lackluster peg warmers that didn’t even make it to the planned second series. Why would Disney take another chance on these toys just sitting around?

Well, maybe because this movie is supposed to be Disney’s “Star Wars”! The stories that set the mold. And it has no toys. How are kids going to get excited about a movie that gives them no ownership after they leave the theater? What plants the idea of John Carter and his amazing world in their heads to drag Mom & Dad to opening day? How are they going to beg to go back for a second showing without having spent their afternoons playing “John Carter” with their action figures with little Ricky down the street? Well, they’re not. You know why? Because thanks to Star Wars, every license is a blockbuster waiting to happen in the eyes of the studio. George Lucas famously gave up an increase in his fee in exchange for the merchandising rights to Star Wars. No studio exec will ever let the possibility of giving away the golden goose happen again, for fear of their job.

So the licensing fees for a potential tentpole film are astronomical. If the budget is huge then it goes up even more. And when toy manufacturers, themselves burned by all the Trons and Prince of Persias and Terminator:Salvations don’t want to risk that much money on what may seem to be an iffy prospect, the studio opts for no toys to be made rather than lower their price. You know what? To sell this movie they should have given away the rights for next to nothing. They should have held back Pixar toys as a package deal with John Carter. They should have paid their existing partners to crank out John Carter toys to stand as free advertising in every toy store, Walmart, and Target months before the movie came out. But now it’s too late. I truly hope in spite of all of this that John Carter is a big hit. That Andrew Stanton hits it out of the park. That it becomes something more than a one-off, destined to be a cult favorite one day. But I remember another film based on a pulp hero that Disney mismarketed and had no toys. And I know the Rocketeer had no sequels, either.

As the years have gone by and I’ve gotten older (and wiser?) I’ve come to notice that every time one of our “distinguished men of AFi” have posted pictures of their past childhood holiday toy pictures that something has been missing from my life: namely, and similar pictures of MY childhood Christmases filled with toys. For that matter, I really never had any pictures of much of my childhood, period, outside of the typical family portraits. Or so I thought. Last year while home for the holidays I made an off-hand remark to that effect to my mother, who then asked why didn’t I look in all the boxes of slides we had stored upstairs. Turns out that my parents DID take a tremendous amount of pictures, only they were almost all slide film and then put away once we stopped gathering around the ol’ Kodak Carousel. Since I was curious as to what slides we had, I took it upon myself to scan them all and convert them into nice digital files.

Well, over 6000 slides, 12 months, and many hundreds of hours later, I now know what is on all of those slides (and might I add they date back into the 1950s, well before I was around). And I still have around 2000 more slides to scan…unless they find even more boxes, which is a very distinct possibility. But within all of those pictures, I did find a number of great shots of what I received for Christmases past. I haven’t gotten into the 1980s yet, and if you had asked me before I scanned them what toys I received, I would have told you that I mainly got cars & planes, model trains, and a toy drum set until 1978. At that point my life was overtaken by Star Wars, (I even made my own xmas stocking shaped like Boba Fett’s leg, seen at right!) and I can’t really remember owning any other toys until I started collecting in earnest in college (well after throwing away everything I had in childhood).

What I wouldn’t have said I owed was any GI Joe toys. I do remember having the awesome Sea Wolf sub, and maybe a Joe with Kung-Fu grip, but I would have stopped there and said I didn’t play with the Joes. I would have been a damn liar. Turns out there is photographic proof that I indeed played with Joes. In fact, I owned a number of Adventure Team Joes, playsets and vehicles. And now that I’ve seen all these sets in their awesome packaging, I really, really wish I still owned them! Ah well. Take a look at the coolness below, along with some other early 1970s toys I wish I still owned, and a few other shots for a geeky childhood. I do still own that great Mickey Mouse head bank, along now with the other 3 characters they made. And as much as I claim to not like the Muppets, I apparently liked them enough back then to have a big-ass poster of Kermit and Fozzie on my wall. Anyway, enjoy the nostalgia!

The Space Shuttle Columbia Lands at Kelly Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas, March 1979

Or, what the Space Shuttle means to me.

On Thursday, July 21 2011, US Space Shuttle Atlantis touched down for the final time, returning from the last mission that the shuttle program will fly for the United States. The program and the shuttles themselves have been retired, cast aside due to a national lack of enthusiasm and a casualty of the ludicrous economic battles that pass for governance these days. But none of that matters to me when I think of the Space Shuttle.

First and foremost, to me it remains the last exciting moment of the US Space program that really touched people when I was growing up. Sure, the Mars rover and the various interstellar missions of the past 20 years have been interesting, but the Space Shuttle program was a continuance of that bright, shining age when it really looked as if the science fiction was being coming the science reality. It was totally conceivable that by the year 2000 we might have (small) colonies on the moon, or a floating city in space to replace Skylab.

In 1979 my dad was in the Air Force, working at Kelly AFB in San Antonio when it was announced that the newly christened Shuttle Columbia, the first shuttle to go into space, would be stopping at Kelly overnight to refuel on it’s way to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. I was already excited about the shuttle, having seen the promos for the new James Bond movie, Moonraker, that was coming out that summer, so when dad woke me at 6am so we could drive across town to Kelly Field and watch it take off the news morning (on the back of a 747) I was beyond excited. I, of course loved Star Wars, and Buck Rogers, but this was REAL. I remember there were a lot of people who showed up to watch what was basically a big plane sit on a runaway, it an event that was closed to the public.

Afterwards, we went to a hobby shop (Hobbies Unlimited, in Universal City, Tx) where he bought me a small toy Space Shuttle. I remember keeping it sitting on my desk for quite some time, enamored by it’s unique shape and markings. Unlike previous spacecraft, the shuttle was a sleek, cool looking vehicle. I think it’s no coincidence that so many movies worked in the actual shuttle design instead of aping Star Wars when dealing with “non-fighter” craft. Unfortunately, we know how the rest of the story goes: I saw the Challenger disaster happen live on tv in my 11th grade art class. I remember how horrified and distraught my teachers were that one of their own was on that ship. And the Columbia herself came to rest back in Texas in 2003 in another horrific accident, although I was in California by then.

But with all that, when I think of the Space Shuttle my mind always goes back to that little toy one my dad bought me, and the long gone hobby shop where it was purchased. You can still find hobby shops, where you can buy model planes and trains, but they are becoming few and far between. Like Borders bookstores that are closing for good this month, and Circuit City, And Linen’s & Things, and all the mom & pop bookstores and variety stores before them, we are left with just one or two big box stores for each category now. The era of stores that catered to specialty items exist online, but it’s not the same. There is something to be said for riding your bike to the hobby shop for a model, then to the variety store (Winn’s? TG&Y?) for some action figures, then on to the drugstore for trading cards and a soda, ending up at the neighborhood used bookstore where the owner has a little side room filled with old comics and pulp paperbacks to leaf through. But those days are gone, and they’re not coming back. And now I fear the days of excitement over space exploration are joining them on the shelf marked “nostalgia”.

Five years ago, shortly before I left California for Texas, Julius Marx and I paid a visit to the studio of a truly fantastic artist, sculptor, and all-around great guy: Rubén Procopio. If you don’t recognize the name you surely will recognize his work (and if you don’t recognize the name, shame on you!).

First, Rubén has recently written an awesome book (with Tim Bruckner and Zach Oat), Pop Sculpture, that anyone who is interested in sculpture should read. If you want to be a sculptor, I would even say stop reading this blog right now and go buy a copy. It’s a really, really informative look at the whole process of creating action figures and statues based on popular media properties.

Second, Rubén has been involved in so many areas that are near and dear to my heart that I alternate being in awe of him and being bitterly jealous. 😉 Just kidding! But seriously, he started at the Disney Studios in the 1970s, following in the footsteps of his father, Adolfo Procopio (and if you’ve ever been to Disneyland or Disneyworld, you’ve seen a lot of Adolfo spectacular sculpts), and was mentored by the fabled Nine Old Men (Eric Larson in particular) as he rose through the ranks of Disney Animation.

In the 1980s, he was a key figure in bringing back the art of using animation maquettes to guide the artists, creating some of the first ones for The Great Mouse Detective, Oliver & Company, and The Little Mermaid. While at Disney, Rubén was also being mentored by Alex Toth, whose comic art style can be seen influencing Rubén’s take on The Phantom and Zorro. Since leaving Disney as an animation supervisor, Rubén has created sculptures for Walt Disney Consumer Products, Walt Disney Classics Collection, Bowen Designs, Sideshow Collectibles, and DC Direct through his Masked Avengers Studio. Most notably, he’s produced a wide array of items for his former Disney colleague Tracy Mark Lee at Electric Tiki. Rubén was further able to honor his long time love for pulp heroes by spearheading the Classic Heroes Collection, featuring everyone from Dick Tracy and Doc Savage to The Rocketeer and Hellboy. Even Lassie got some love! I can’t tell you how much I love this series; the only thing that would have made me happier is if they were able to make a figure line that looked just like these sculpts, only articulated.

Rubén was gracious enough to let me take pictures of his workspace and some of his past projects to share. The artistry on display here just blows my mind, especially considering his medium of choice is Super Sculpey! So check out the pics below (click on a picture to enlarge and get commentary below each shot) and then leave some comments! And go check out his own blog for lots more gems!

That’s right, true believer! Mattel’s toy line of Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars lives again! And it’s a crazy tale that will Thunderball you over with its twists and turns. But first, let me lay down a little background on you for those not already in the know:

It all started with a phone call. In 1983 Mattel, the largest toy company in the world, contacted Marvel Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter. Having recently lost their bid to make toys of the DC Comics characters to Kenner Toys, Mattel immediately went to Marvel for the chance at a competing toy line. Shooter was intrigued by the talks, but Mattel did have one condition: they wanted a big event to base the toys on in lieu of any TV or film support. The specifics weren’t important as long as it was called “Secret Wars”- two words that Mattel had found tested well with adolescent boys. And so the tongue-twisting “Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars” was born. Although Mattel had input into the mini-series’ direction and Marvel did everything they could to facilitate new toys (creating new characters, changing existing character’s costumes, and highlighting vehicles and play environments), Mattel ultimately used very little specifics from the Secret Wars comics itself.

Roger Sweet, the creator of Masters of the Universe at Mattel, was responsible for oversight of the new line. “I had been put in charge of managing the design creation of the 1983 He-Man / Masters Of The Universe line, and continued to do so through the 1987 line.”, said Roger. “But, in about 1984, I was also given responsibility for managing the design creation of the Marvel Secret Wars line. Mattel had gone to Marvel in the hope of picking up the Marvel line, and did so. Previously, Mattel had been to DC Comics in the hope of acquiring the DC license. But, Mattel lost out to Kenner. By Mattel Marketing and upper management, the Marvel Secret Wars line was viewed as a “flanker brand” to Masters. In other words, it was considered as a secondary brand to pick up additional male action sales for Mattel, but while cutting little into Masters’ sales. That is why the Marvel figures were designed smaller and far less muscular than the Masters figures.” So these figures were intentionally “dumbed down” to not only save production costs, but to literally be a lesser product to not compete with MOTU, but still pick up subsidiary sales, much like Marvel’s SuperHeroSquad does today (of course, we still see this theory in effect today at Mattel, with lines like JLU). This also explains how a smaller company like Kenner got the DC license instead of Mattel; because they were willing to put more money and effort into it.

Secret Wars figures were articulated only at the shoulders, hips and neck and had no special “action feature” like Kenner’s Super Powers or Mattel’s own Masters of the Universe. Most of the figures shared one of 3 basic bodies, with only minimal custom detail tooled for each character. This also meant that there would be no characters with unusual bodies that couldn’t be reused or that were oversized and would need unique packaging. Mr. Sweet explains how the direction of the line was decided: “I was quite familiar with the Marvel Comics characters. I had grown up with some of them, and had read about them in the Marvel comics. Marvel provided very little actual support, but would have if Mattel had needed it. My design group and Marketing handled the selection of the Marvel figures to go into the Mattel Marvel line, and the creation of the other product like vehicles and playsets.”

The first series to hit store shelves featured the customary stalwart Marvel characters along with some new fan favorites getting toys for the very first time. Roger Sweet’s design group, “along with Marketing, selected the figures. They were selected largely because they were the main known Marvel good and bad guys at that time, or appealed to someone at Mattel”. It’s safe to say that colorful characters and ones that were easy to produce also played a factor in figure selection.

Series 2 hit shelves in early 1985, but by this time the line was already ceasing production overseas. Whereas the first series featured characters that all played a big role in the Secret Wars comic, nearly all of the characters in this next series didn’t appear in Secret Wars at all! Even during production then, some concepts never made it to shelves. “There was one vehicle that I created and designed that was very neat. And, I commissioned an outside designer to do a beautiful full-color styled illustration of it. The vehicle had one figure sitting inside a cockpit and another figure standing on the back manning a machine gun. But the vehicle later was deleted in the Mattel visual design department and replaced by a much less appealing vehicle of another type.” laments Mr. Sweet.

Series 2- Falcon, Hobgoblin, Baron Zemo, Black Spider-Man, Daredevil

Unfortunately the toys were not a giant hit on the scale of He-Man and his pals and within just 2 years of launch, the Secret Wars line was already in clearance bins at toy store around the country. The cancellation of the line was so abrupt that three figures for the third series were already in production. Rather than destroy these toys, they were released in Europe only as there were not enough of them to distribute to all the American markets.

European Figures- Constrictor, Electro, Iceman

Once again, the only three new characters never appeared in the Secret Wars comics, and in fact they were not even very well known or popular in the comics of the day. The cost cutting could readily be seen by this point: outside of new heads, each of their bodies are recycled from earlier figures with no added details. Like much of the other characters, this would be the first time any of them had been made into toys. Unlike the other series, these three are by far the rarest pieces in the entire line, and even at the time of their release were hard to find if you didn’t like in Europe.

And that’s where it ended, as a pale shadow of other contemporary lines, yet the only glimpse fans had of their favorite characters in plastic during Marvel’s heyday. But was it really the end?

Well, apparently Mattel had further plans for these stalwart heroes and heroines. Yep, now it can be told: there were TWO more assortments planned and it seems that they were a good ways into production when the line was cancelled. We’ve done a little detective work coupled with the find of some artwork for those final waves to bring you the whole story. The artwork in and of itself is quite a find. This isn’t concept art, but actual production art to be used for one of the most overlooked items in the Secret Wars saga: the lenticular shields used by all of the figures! Each figure came with four lenticular inserts- one in the shield and three in a baggie. The inserts showed unique scenes on front and back pertaining to each character; some of them showed secret identities, some showed a demonstration of their powers, and most showed them in battle with other characters that had figures so kids could act out the mayhem on their own.

And that fact is key to figuring out what was going to be made: no shield produced featured characters that were NOT a part of the Secret Wars line. So looking at the artwork created for the unmade figures’ shields we can see that the characters that were previously unknown are: Mr. Fantastic, the Abomination, Annihilus, Thunderball, and Dazzler! Yes, as crazy as it seems (and really, this entire line-up is pretty crazy) the first female figure that the toy line was going to have was not Phoenix, not Invisible Girl, not Scarlet Witch, but Dazzler. Oh kay.

But maybe she wasn’t going to be the first. There were two more characters featured on the shield artwork that hadn’t been seen before, but didn’t have full set of art themselves: the Hulk and Mystique. And this is really the final piece of the puzzle, because some of the existing characters seen on the artwork include Iceman, Electro, and Constrictor: the 3 “European” Secret Wars figures. If we assume that Mattel’s plans going forward were to mirror the second wave, and offer 5 new characters with some re-released older figures in each assortment, then it seems apparent that wave three would have actually been Electro, Iceman, Constrictor, The Hulk, and Mystique. The Hulk has long been reported by multiple sources to have been sculpted, and Mystique would have made a very striking, colorful figure. Especially since the prevailing mantra of the time was “girls don’t sell” in the action figure world, having an “alien” looking girl just might help counter that wisdom. It also makes sense why only three of them were released to Europe: these figures only needed tooling for new heads, and their bodies were straight repaints of earlier figures and therefore were cheap to produce and recoup costs on what was already in production. But tooling new bodies like the Hulk or Mystique would cost much more, giving them no chance to make their money back unless they were released wide in a big market like the U.S.

The fourth wave probably wasn’t that far into production, with most of the artwork not even having been inked yet, let alone colored and formatted for lenticular prints (and that also explains why there is finished artwork so far out; the lenticular process took more time than normal printing schedules). But we can see how Dazzler would have been meant reuse the Mystique body, Abomination the Hulk body, and the rest reusing and repainting existing bodies with maybe new wings for Annihilus and a new neck or arms for Mr. Fantastic. (UPDATE: it is now known that at least the Hulk and Abomination WERE sculpted and reside in the Mattel’s vaults! Hopefully one day we’ll see pictures of these long-awaited figures.)

Of course, we haven’t talked yet about WHO exactly drew this artwork. Earlier series had art by comic pros such as Mike Zeck and Bob Layton. But Mattel also had their own stable of artists that they used for lines like Masters of the Universe. Some of them were established comic artists, too, like the great Mike Sekowsky, who drew some alternate Mr. Fantastic pieces, and Pete Von Sholly, who drew the Thunderball artwork. But the majority of these pieces were handed over to a young artist who was then doing a bang-up job on the MOTU mini-comics. An artist who would go on to establish himself as having not only a distinctive art style, but also a unique voice that would remake how people saw superhero animation. Yes, these images would have been the first professional published superhero art by Bruce Timm, who confirmed it for us himself. “Holy crap, I’d completely forgotten about that stuff “, said Bruce. “It was so long ago, my memory’s pretty hazy, but these were the only pieces I did for the Secret Wars line — and yes, I guess this was my first “professional” spandex/superhero art”. Another artist who worked on the line remembers that “the line was cancelled while they were working on it, but [I] really don’t have more memory of it. Bruce came in at the end, which is why I don’t believe any of his were ever produced.” According to him, they were specifically commissioned by Mattel to create this final art. His notes on the last two assignments character assignments reads: Abomination, Dazzler, Mr. Fantastic, Annihilus, Hulk, Glider (1st of two), and Mystique, Vision, Thunderball. Color was never produced for these two batches, so they got a kill fee for that aspect. This is the only mention of the Vision, as no artwork involving him has shown up anywhere (it is possible that the art for the Vision was never started,with the cancellation of the line happening before that point and much of the artwork in pencil only).

Hero Shields

Dazzler

Dazzler vs Annihilus

Dazzler vs Constrictor

Dazzler vs Villains

Dazzler vs bars

Dazzler vs Abomination

Mr Fantastic

Mr Fantastic vs Abomination

Mr Fantastic vs Doom Roller

Mr Fantastic vs Electro

Mr Fantastic vs Villains

Mr Fantastic vs Abomination (Sekowsky

Mr Fantastic vs Hobgoblin (Sekowsky)

Mr Fantastic (Sekowsky)

Villain Shields

The Abomination

Abomination vs building

Abomination vs Captain America

Abomination vs wall

Abomination vs Hulk

Abomination vs Wolverine

Annihilus

Annihilus vs Hulk

Annihilus vs Base

Annihilus vs Captain America

Annihilus vs Dazzler

Annihilus vs Daredevil

Annihilus vs Spider-Man

Thunderball

Thunderball vs bike

Thunderball vs Captain America

Thunderball vs helicopter

Thunderball vs Spider-Man

Thunderball vs Iceman

Thunderball vs wall

Bruce didn’t just draw the figure’s shields, though. Also included in his artwork were some new gliders (like the Doom Star and Star Dart) and “Battle Board” art that appears to be tied to new “mini-rig” type vehicles that probably would have been packaged with a figure or two for a deluxe package.

Battle Boards

Iron Man

Captain America

Constrictor

Daredevil

Mystique

Spider-Man

Electro

Dr. Doom

Wolverine

Gliders

Mystique

Spider-Man

With this great new look at what might have been we can only step back and marvel at how amazing, fantastically bizarre this toy line really was. To this day we do not yet have figures of Baron Zemo 2 and Dazzler, and Constrictor is only just showing up now. But the likelihood of turning up actual sculpts of the unproduced toys seems to be pretty slim. According to a source “in the know”, there is nothing in the Mattel archives concerning Secret Wars. Apparently Mattel kept terrible records back then and anything pre-1995 is kind of a lost cause.

There is a copy of Dr. Doom’s original weapon (?) that was not included with the figure in one of their display cases. And the rumors swirl that Hulk and The Thing were sculpted. But unless the prototypes were still on someone’s desk who has worked there all these years, or in a retired designer’s drawer hidden away from the world, it is doubtful we’ll ever know just what could have been had Mattel stuck it out for just one more year back in 1985.

When I first started collecting toys back around 1990 I would run into other collectors sporadically (this being in the dark days before the internet collecting community at large had coalesced around USENET, for the most part). One way I would know that they were die-hard toy hunters was that they had had “The Dream”. Usually this centered around Star Wars, but every collector who I talked with had it at one point or another after they had become totally immersed in hunting down old toys.

Make no mistake, The Dream never involved new toys. It always started with you being in a store (most likely a store that no longer existed, frequently a department store that still had a toy section) and as you wander through the store you find all the toys you wish were still there brand new on the shelves. And tons of them: the first 12-back Star Wars figures, all MOC. The original run of Master of the Universe. The 3rd wave of Super Powers. Maybe a Bionic Bigfoot, or Micronauts vehicle peeking around the endcap. And even better, toys that were never made! A vintage Tie Bomber! A Bantha playset! A whole rack of He-Ro figures!

Well, I didn’t have that dream often, but I did have it. Up until about 12 years ago, that is. And then it went away, probably because nothing was hard to find anymore thanks to eBay, and everything you wish had been made in the 1970s was now being made in the present day. But last night, I had the dream again! Sorta…

I dreamt that I was buying Marvel Universe figures. And not just the ones I’ve been passing up, but ones we haven’t seen yet, like the Lizard, and Juggernaut, and Wendigo. And even better, there were a lot of DC characters there too: Superman, Joker, Killer Croc, Blue Devil. All sculpted just like the MU figures. Now, I don’t know what this means. I’m in the process of dumping most of my toy collection for good, and I surely don’t need anything new outside of DCUC to take my money these days.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t do some mental calculations about just how much it would cost to catch up on the MU figures as soon as I woke up…

Update – 2014: Of course, now I own about 85% of all the Marvel Universe figures! Go here to check out just how many of these things have been made so far at Daniel Lynch’s awesome MU checklist! The packaging alone on this line is just amazing, with top-level Marvel artists creating custom illustrations specifically for the toy line. You just don’t see that any more! Here’s who did what:

Holy. Cow. This was one of the most amazing movies I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure I know how else to describe it. It was, hands down, the best adaptation of a comic or cartoon to movie EVER.

Now, before I get tons of hate mail, let me explain what I mean. I do not mean that it was the best comic/cartoon based film I’ve ever seen. I do not mean it is the best film of it’s kind. In fact, I don’t even mean I liked it all that much. I did find it entertaining, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not a great movie.

What it is, though, is a great spectacle. You almost can’t take your eyes off of it. It is such a huge leap in the construction of these types of “green screen” spectaculars that I think it needs it’s own classification. It’s not really live action (although the actors are not modified). It definitely isn’t one of those zombie filled motion capture movies, and it certainly isn’t animated. But the entire thing is alive- the actors, the backgrounds, the cars. The way they treat the overall world the character’s inhabit outdoes video games. It really is something amazing. as it is totally like a cartoon (and a crazy cartoon at that) and yet everything has a very grounded feel, as if the cars all behave according to actual physics, if not the physics we must obey ourselves.

This is the movie that Dick Tracy wanted to be. And it is a perfect translation of the old Speed Racer cartoons: all of the conceits and touches are included, and the characters are spot on. The casting is great, and the plot is just fine as a logical distillation of the essence of Speed Racer. It’s the best adaptation because this IS the cartoon. All of it. The costumes haven’t been changed. The cars are the same. The dialogue and characterizations are amazingly intact (especially Spritle and Chim-Chim).

BUT.

But Speed Racer just isn’t that much to hang a movie on. I know it has fans, but there isn’t much to the old cartoons that allow the universe to be fleshed out and to breathe with the importance that justifies this kind of a budget. I didn’t see it in theaters (although now that I have seen it I regret that mightily) but I knew s soon as it was announced that no one would see it in theaters, at least not enough people to make it a hit. The property has been revived many times in the past, and it never lasts long as cartoons or toys. And that’s a shame as I think this deserves to be seen.

What the Wachowski’s have done right here is number one to treat everything with the same weight they did the Matrix films. No matter how goofy the staging or the effects, no matter how unreal the camera moves or the races, all of the characters act as if they are doing very real, and very serious things. The actors never once wink at the audience or crack a smile toward the camera to let us know that they know it’s all one big joke. But they also updated what needed to be updated, all the while keeping in mind the spirit of the original. (Dick Tracy just tried to slavishly copy the comic designs and matched them with a truly garish color scheme, but threw out EVERYTHING that the actual comic strip was about.)

Sure, this is also pretty much what Chris Nolan did for the year’s biggest film (actually the decade’s biggest film): The Dark Knight. But it’s a lot easier to say you’re going to hire the top tier “serious” actors and put everyone is “real” clothes and then go dark. It’s amazingly tough to pull the same thing off in day glo colors and cartoon costumes. This actually isn’t a terribly new idea, but most people just don’t get it. The Godfather took gangster B-movies and treated them like top class A pictures. The characters in Jaws felt like real people, not like the crazy stereotypes of a Deep Blue Sea. And the reason no one has been able to recapture the feeling of Raiders of the Lost Ark (including the new installment of Indiana Jones) is that in Raiders the characters acted like real people in extraordinary circumstances.
Again, though, none of those were animated cartoons. I think the most amazing thinking about all this is that WB spent nearly $200 million bringing this to life. No matter how well made this was going to be, it was never going to bring in that kind of money. What I would do now if I was WB president Alan Horn, though, is send the Wachowskis a DVD of all the Fleischer Superman cartoons and tell them to run with a period film for the next Superman. Hire a solid writer to help them on the script, who knows what makes the character tick (Geoff Johns, perhaps or maybe Grant Morrison). And then get out of their way. Because the a Superman film with this kind of thinking behind it, and this level of cinematic mastery, could finally give us a REAL superhero film. Not a dark, “guy in leather” type thing we’ve been getting all this time, but a real comic come to life, that doesn’t mistake a comic for a cartoon.

So I started this year vowing to cut back on the toy buying. In fact, I had quit buying almost all together, thanks in part to it being so hard to find Mattel’s latest offerings and the fact that Hasbro has delayed the next batch of Marvel Legends for so long. In any case I wasn’t planning on starting any new lines. And then I went to see this:

And within a few days I had bought everything seen in the picture above!

Now, don’t get me wrong; I love Indiana Jones. It’s just that I hadn’t planned collecting any of these, really, especially after dropping the Star Wars line in 2001. I was narrowing the collection down to just the DCUC line and a few Marvel Legends that filled gaps in my nostalgia collection. Mainly because as I get older I care less about owning toys, and also the small fact of having 60+ boxes of action figures sealed away that i will probably never open or display every again.

But once I saw the film and then saw all the toys on sale the next day something deep within me snapped and before I knew it I was carrying them to the register and buying a good chunk of what was out there. It didn’t help that I had ordered the “Making of” book and the soundtrack the morning before I saw the film (the book is good, but not anywhere near as good as the great Making of Star Wars book they put out last year. Much of the info here is from the documentaries that were on the DVDs!)

I did plan on buying one or two figures and maybe the truck vehicle to repaint with a more detailed paint job. As it is, the deco work is one thing that is really bad about these figure. Hasbro claims to be fixing it, so we’ll see. Having come this far, I’ll at least pick up the main characters from Temple of Doom and Last Crusade, along with whatever major characters are left over from Raiders. But I don’t need 20 Indys, Mutts, or army builders. Maybe I’ll just paint them and put them all on eBay next year, I dunno. In any case, I already broke down and got the great Sideshow 12″ figure when it went on sale to go next to my Medicom Rocketeer and assortedreal lifecharacters, Generals, and Presidents. And now I have the new figures displayed on both sides of the vintage Kenner ones from 1982.

So what did I think of the movie? Well, the short answer is that I enjoyed it a lot while i was watching it. I found it pretty entertaining and I didn’t get bored. My parents happened to be visiting me that week, so I took them on opening day, and being children of the 1950s they enjoyed it a lot. And that made me like it probably more than I would have otherwise, having seen Raiders of the Lost Ark on opening weekend with my Mom 27 years ago.

But it could have been better. It is better than Temple of Doom (in my opinion), but suffers from the same problem: a good story, good set pieces, good action that is hampered by an inelegant script. Say what you will about Last Crusade, but the dialogue and character motivations are solid. Yes, I know some people don’t like the revised characterizations of Indy and Marcus Brody from Raiders, but within that story everyone behaves as logically as you could expect them to for a film of this type. For that matter, this is the same problem that the Star Wars prequels have. I can only imagine this is mainly a “George Lucas need an editor” issue. He’s a fantastic storyteller, but a pretty bad with dialogue and motivation.

So here are my thoughts about the film. SPOILERS AHEAD!!! Keep in mind that I did enjoy it quite a bit, and felt that Spielberg really nailed the era it is set in, and the overall look of the film, which fits in very well as a “lost” 80s movie in terms of pacing, editing, and lighting. I really loved all of the 50s elements: the hot rods, greasers, atomic age paranoia, and even the sci-fi angle. I didn’t mind the fact that the artifact in this film was extraterrestrial, and really liked Lucas’ idea of following the 50s “saucer men” conventions instead of the 30s serial ones. The music fit perfectly, with a hint of theremin even. Unfortunately, 50s sci-fi music was very atmospheric and not much for stirring character themes like the 30s scores of Rozsa and Steiner so there are very few memorable new cues from John Williams this go-round. I liked Shia’s character and acting well enough and of course loved that they brought back Marion instead of trying to introduce a new “girl” that would have to be either in Indy’s age range (icky?) or much younger (creepy!).

What I didn’t like are all the things that made it seem not like an Indiana Jones film. For one thing, all of the other films open with a segment that feels like it is the ending of a movie that we haven’t seen. This one picks up in the middle of an ongoing story all right, but is more or less a prologue to the movie we’re about to see. It also sets up a great “commie witchhunt” angle that is then completely dropped! Almost nothing that happens in the prologue pays off in a meaningful way later. In the first draft of the script (Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars) written waaay back in 1994 this sequence took place near the middle of the film. I would have rather seen a prologue that has nothing to do with this film, start with the Yale sequence and then have the Soviets grab Indy and Mutt and take them to Hanger 51. Everything else could proceed from there, with the FBI goons basically blacklisting him at that point.

It would also break up the film a bit more. One thing that bothered me even as I was watching was that not only did everything see to happen very easily without much hassle, but they traveled in a fairly linear manner: Mutt gives Indy a letter about South America, Indy figures out a code the Soviets couldn’t crack IN SECONDS they travel to Peru where he figures out where to go IN SECONDS they go to graveyard that doesn’t seem to be in the least bit hidden, are attacked by useless guardians (who are these guys?), find the skull immediately, and it continues like this for the rest of the film. It would at least seem a bit more challenging if they had traveled somewhere other than South America to find the conquistador, and THEN went to Peru. Of course, Temple of Doom suffers from this very same thing- too long in one place.

Speaking of plotlines that got dropped, why make such a big deal about Mutt bringing his bike to South America with them, and then never mentioning it again? Why bring up the human looking Mitchell-Hedges Crystal Skulls if they have no relevance to the plot or the alien skulls? Why do the Soviets get the alien from Hanger 51, yet not try to use its skull? How is it connected to the Akator aliens? Where does it go? What connection do the graveyard warriors have to Akator? What are they guarding, if not the skull? If they are guarding the skull, why? Again, too many things are brought up in the script with no payoff later. We never even see Indy and Marion really reunite, or Marion and Mutt reunite, it’s all like a sitcom reunion. And shouldn’t Oxley and Indy have some sort of reconciliation once Ox’s mind is right? Seriously, why does David Keopp have any kind of reputation? Frank Darabont’s unused draft had better action and motivations, but it wasn’t perfect, either.

I’ll skip complaining about the CGI, except to say my biggest objection to it was that it removed any feeling of danger and made a lot of locations feel like soundstages. In the first film, I was nervous about Indy hanging on to a truck. In the second, I marveled at him being on a rope bridge over a humongous chasm. In the third, he’s on a horse vs a tank. All of these felt like he was actually doing these things. In this film he goes over 3 giant waterfalls and is a little bit wet. No one in the CAR is even slightly sore! They drove off a cliff to get there! C’mon! The ants weren’t particularly scary, but it was a nice nod back to another 50s film, the Naked Jungle. I’d have rather George included a river boat sequence with crocodiles like the ones in the earlier “Saucer Men” draft and even the rejected script for the 3rd movie, Indiana Jones and the Monkey King. I guess Lucas just wanted to let Disney own that concept in their upcoming Jungle Cruise film.

I talked a bit earlier at how I liked Mutt and Marion. I thought that they, and Indy, and even Irina were fleshed out well enough for this film. Marion needed more to do, but all of them had nice moments and they felt like consistent characters. The rest of the Soviets were a waste (and why cast real Russian actors when only one of them had anything to do outside of shout and run?) Speaking of a waste, what is the point of Ray Winstone’s character at all? He doesn’t really effect the plot at all, and is given very little to do. And I understand that John Hurt is supposed to be akin to Treasure Island’s crazy Ben Gunn, but it would have been nice to see him have some resonance on any level with the audience. Even the characters in the film treat him more or last as a dog they found and are taking along for the ride.

And honestly, did we need all these great big-name actors? Indiana Jones is supposed to be a down & dirty serial, not an Oscar contender. Outside of Sean Connery (which was an in-joke that made sense) the other films didn’t have any acting heavyweights involved. Sure, they had great character actors, but not of the caliber of Cate Blanchett, Ray Winstone, Jim Broadbent, and John Hurt. Even Shia starred in freaking Transformers! I think the story would have been much better served without so many recognizable faces on the screen every five minutes. Even minor roles had me saying “hey look, it’s Charles Widmore from LOST! And the janitor from Scrubs!” and I don’t even watch much TV. This same thing was a detriment to the Star Wars prequels. Although I don’t want Lucas casting the parts if it gives us the Indiana Jones equivalent of Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christenson. *shudder*.

Anyway, I could go on and on, but I did enjoy it pretty well for what it is and am looking forward to seeing it again on DVD. Unlike Star Wars, which is one long story, the Indiana Jones films are relatively self contained and each one’s merits don’t necessarily effect the others. After all, these are meant to be the B movies of today, and for my money they’re still better than crap like Transformers or the Matrix sequels. I think they could even extend the franchise with Mutt for some fun 60s styled adventures and i don’t have a problems with that at all.

Man, that’s a lot of writing for no good reason! Check back in a couple of days for my long-awaited follow-up of more unseen Star Wars concepts!

Ok, so I’m in the grocery store the other day and while I was walking down the aisle between the fine products from Campbell’s Soup Company and the displays of healthy Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups there was a sidecap rack with Little Golden Books on it. (Not to be confused with the German dog food brand, seen at right.)

Never one to pass by a literary opportunity, I glanced over at the rack and perused the title held within. What caught my eye was an intriguing tome labeled, “Mister Dog”. Even more intriguing was the fact that in 2008 there was a book marketed to children with a cover illustration of a dog smoking a pipe!

Now, I don’t know what was in Mister Dog’s pipe, but I do know what it felt like *I* had been smoking after reading this book. I’m not sure I can do the crazy, mixed-up world of Mister Dog justice, but suffice it to say that I bought that book then and there! The story generally follows the adventures of a dog that belonged to himself, with the challenging name of Crispin’s Crispian. Who is Crispin? Is the dog Crispin and “Crispian” is a term of endearment? Is it one of those weird cultural oddities, like “Carl’s Jr.” or “Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse”?

Anyway, the dog screws around, then meets a boy who is apparently a runaway. They go buy some food and take it back to the two-story doghouse, where they eat and go to sleep. The boy helps him clean the house. The dog almost never stops smoking. And was he chewing on his own hat? I wouldn’t put it past him, he is a dog. Seriously, it’s just some crazy-ass stuff. But don’t take my word for it, why not read this fine review. I wish Michael Bay would concentrate on classics to adapt like Mister Dog, rather than that Transformers crap.

The sad dénouement of all this was finding out that this was the last story of the author, Margaret Wise Brown. Ms. Brown was more famous as the writer of the wistful tale of nighttime ritual, “Goodnight, Moon”. But while on a promotional tour of Europe she fell ill and was hospitalized. After recuperating somewhat she tried to demonstrate her renewed health to her nurse by performing a high-kick, which triggered a sudden embolism that killed her on the spot. Oh, and she also owned a dog named “Crispin’s Crispian”, so I guess that explains that.

In addition to books and toys, I buy a lot of DVDs. Mainly old movies, because I’ve already discovered that they don’t always stay in print for long, and then command crazy insane prices on eBay once they’re out of print. Plus, the past few years have been great as far as the rarer films are concerned, with studios realizing that if they do a good job with restoring this stuff it will sell, and at a premium price.

Unfortunately, the marketing dept. in these studios seem to think that buyers need some kind of bribe to get them to purchase these sets (they also eschew good package art in favor of a lot of photoshopped crap, but that’s another topic). Hey, I can understand this; I’m in marketing myself and am sometimes involved in the same kind of inane “plussing up” of a product for no reason (forgive me for not naming specifics 😉 ). But above all else, these special offers should not interfere with the actual item being purchased.

Which leads me to today’s rant: the newly released Walt Disney Legacy series. This first series packages every last “True-Life Adventure” film in four stuffed volumes. On one hand now that Roy Disney is back in the fold the studio has done a truly fantastic job putting these together, with tons of extras, documentaries, and nice restorations of films that have too long been unavailable. And as far as I can tell it’s a pretty comprehensive package. On the other hand, the marketing dept. thinks that the films themselves are not enough, and takes the path of the tin outer cases they made for the ‘Walt Disney Treasures’ line on step further: the DVDs are loose inside a tin “film reel canister”!

The ‘Treasures’ tin cases at least could be removed and inside was a normal dvd case (otherwise when they are on a shelf you cannot tell what they are since there is no printing on the spine…if they fit on the shelf in the first place). But these new film reels can’t be put on a shelf without them rolling off, and you can’t tell what’s inside without picking each one up and looking at the front cover. Granted, the packaging is very handsome, but how on Earth do these things get decided without ever thinking about the purpose of the item and the functionality in a collection (since by and large it is the core Disney fans who are buying these limited sets)? This is the same mentality that leads to crazy figure packaging that makes it impossible to remove the darn figure (and jacks up the price) just because some designer thinks it looks cool. I’m looking at you, SDCC Solomon Grundy.

Anyway, this whole thing got me so aggravated that I made my own covers and bought some double dvd cases online. So everyone can now benefit from my frustrations- right-click on a cover below and choose “save as” to download a hi-res pdf of each cover that you can print out and use on your own dvds. All for free! (Caution: files are large!)

I’ve been a collector for as long as I can remember. When I was around three years old, I collected sticks. Yes, ordinary branches that had fallen from trees, which came in all sorts of varieties and limited editions. After that I picked up stuffed animals whenever I could, the more unusual the critter (plush skunks, possums, hyraxes…) the better. Once 1977 hit, though, my entire collecting focus changed. I think we all know what happened in the summer of 1977. From that moment on, my life became Star Wars- Star Wars cookie jars, Star Wars bedsheets, and of course Kenner Star Wars toys. I even started collecting comics by picking up the adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back and discovering Spider-Man on my trips to the comic shop. Once I hit Jr High School my fascination with toys faded away to be replaced by a fascination with girls. But I never stopped collecting, moving on to books, music, sticks…well, maybe not sticks again. Still, I never ceased to find things that once acquired would somehow turn out to be a collection eventually.

Of course, once I was firmly settled in college the toy bug bit again and has led me down the path of both hobby and career, with a little web pioneering thrown in along the way. And so it has gone over the past 10 years; it doesn’t take me long after dropping one collection to gain another one just as quickly. Since entering the promotional premium field I have been acutely interested in Advertising Icons. These are the mascots and slogan bearers of major companies past and present, who have entered the pop culture zeitgeist throughout the decades since the concept first gained traction in the 1930s. Thanks to the wonder of eBay it has become much easier to track down various advertising merchandise made to promote specific businesses, which was great since I wanted a collection for my office only- a collection that others in my field could appreciate a bit more than the usual Spawn figures in every artist’s cubeicle. The problem with collecting these is that with the vast differences in scale, material and quality between pieces is that it never quite felt like a coherent collection. And anyone who knows me knows that I value consistency above nearly all other factors in my collections. One look at the picture on the left will show you the depth of this problem that I faced. (As always, click on each image for a larger view.)

This all changed in 2001 when I happened into a collectible mall in Anaheim, CA. That’s when I saw a bobblehead of Count Chocula. Count Chocula! The figurehead of all the General Mills monster cereals! I was stunned. Now, let me explain that I was by no means a fan of bobbleheads. Truth be told, given a choice I would almost always choose an action figure or maybe a nice solid vinyl doll over the outsized “head on a spring” figurine. And yet…something inside me was awakened by this chance meeting with the good Count. I bought him without delay, and upon opening my new prize I saw the name Funko. A name that I, as informed as anyone in the toy business, had never heard before. This was going to take a bit of research. Such as going to the Funko.com website! Which I did.

What I found was the answer to all my ad icon collection prayers: a new company whose only mission in life was to bring fun to those who wanted something more out of the collecting experience. OK, maybe that’s getting a bit too grandiose. But it was obvious that these guys were following a different path than most of the other companies out there. A path lined with Wacky Wobblers as far as the eye could see.

Funko was started in 1998 by”Chairman of Fun” Mike Becker, who left his high tech job to pursue the dream of making an instant classic item: a “Wacky Wobbler” that was at once nostalgic and yet made with the latest production techniques for total fidelity to the source material. Using his life savings, Becker pursued a retro favorite license, Bob’s Big Boy, for his first Wacky Wobbler. Exceeding all expectations, the Big Boy Wobbler sold like hotcakes. Funko was off to a great start that only got better as word of mouth spread through the collecting community of this bold new line. Within a few short years Funko was entrenched as both the go-to company for top notch premiums and also the only company around who was willing to bring long neglected characters to life. You can read more about Funko’s history here and here. If it’s not obvious by now, then let me assure you dear reader, I love these things.

Just take a look at some of the pictures on this page. In 4 short years I’ve filled the nooks and crannies of my office with Wacky Wobblers. And not just ad icons at this point; over the years I’ve been suckered into picking up classic cartoon characters, too. Since Funko started making the Wobblers, many other companies have jumped on the bobblehead bandwagon. And while some of them, such as NECA and Bosley Bobbers have done some nice work, in my eyes no one can hold a candle to Funko. Let’s start with character selection. While most companies might go after a master license, and then bleed that license dry with variants, resculpts, and oversaturations, Funko takes a unique tack on acquiring license, usually for single characters only and in limited quantities. This keeps the costs down and allows them to put out up to 5 Wobblers a month in a good year. And the choices they have made so far are astounding (in a good way): who else would have not stopped with the main three General Mills monsters and made Fruit Brute and Yummy Mummy, whose cereals have been off the shelves for decades? When was the last time you saw Banana Splits merchandise? Or Speedy Alka-Seltzer? Funko has also made good use of the Hanna-Barbera license, making not only the given characters like the Flintstone and Jetsons, but mining the depths of my generations’ collective childhood to bring us the likes of Captain Caveman, Jabberjaw, and Squiddly Diddley?

The design and sculpting has been above par also, giving many of these characters the best representation they’ve ever had. And the quality of every Funko product is top notch- I never have had to worry about getting a bad paint job which makes it much easier to order these sight unseen through the many websites that sell them. On a side note, I heartily applaud Funko for going with plastic bobbers instead of the cheaper resin ones that most other companies make. Plastic just makes them feel more like “real” mass manufactured itmes, and helps tie them into the ad icons of years gone by. Too many times in the past I’ve been frustrated with the major toy companies who just don’t get it. Funko “gets it”, big time. As an example, one of the most fun aspects of the line is the packaging. Funko puts the time and effort into the design of these that no other company does; many packages mirror the product’s origin (i.e., Count Chocula’s looks like a cereal box) or otherwise make sense for each character. Yet each box still conforms to a general style and uniform shape, making a “mint in box” collection just as attractive as a loose one! They’ve also engineered a great new plastic insert that holds the Wobbler tightly in place with no chance of deformity in shipping, and without any of those darn twist-ties that collectors have grown to hate.

I have to admit that I’ve been lucky in discovering the line when I did. With most Wobblers limited to roughly 10-20,000 pieces this line sells through much faster than a mass market line would. Part of the reason for that is Mike Becker’s insistences on keeping the company small and dealing only with specialty markets. Which is smart, since a larger distribution base would necessitate much larger sales to cover costs. This way they are able to stay profitable and yet make a wide variety of characters each year. In addition to their basic line, Funko also makes custom Wobblers to anyone who wants them. This has led to some very hard to find Wobblers like the Empire Carpet Guy, Magic the Old Navy Dog, and the Outback Steakhouse Kangaroo. They also make a number of variants from time to time, less as a profit center and more as special items for the fans to hunt down. That Funko is extremely collector friendly has never been more evident than at last year’s San Diego Comic Con where they set up a mini supermarket with over 80 variants available with multiple specialty items for the fan base.

Although this article has focused on the Wacky Wobblers, I thought I should mention that Funko has been branching out over the past couple of years into new categories such as the rotocast hand puppets and Spastik Plastik vinyl figures. Who knows how long they’ll continue to make Wacky Wobblers, but with the wealth of material still out there, I’m hoping it will be for many, many years to come. We’ll be covering the Funko booth at this year’s San Diego Comic Con, so check back in a month or so to scope it out!

You can find these for sale at many online stores and many ebay sellers. The average price is $10 per wobbler, but once they are retired it goes up from there. You can also go hang out with the COF and fans in the forums at Funko Funatics. And here is a good checklist to see everything that Funko has made so far.